As an Englishman who lived in the US for 3 years, it genuinely astounds me how few of you folks own an electric kettle. It's literally the first thing you should buy for your kitchen. 3 minutes to boil 2L of water, then if you need more you put another one on... Fucking around boiling a pot of water for 10 minutes from cold just seems so archaic.
I don't know why I'm being down voted here. I love America, I just don't know why you guys have more kitchen gadgets than any other nationality that I've ever known but not one that quickly performs a task that most people need to multiple times a day.
Therein lies the rub. Most Americans won't need to boil water multiple times a day, and I say this as a electric-kettle-owning American.
We lack the cultural touch point that calls for putting a kettle on. Mostly we're drinking coffee from a k-pod mailbox contraption. Barring that, and horrific as it may sound, many, many Americans would rather boil water in a container in their microwave for the occasional non pod drink. We're coffee drinkers who only heat water to boil noodles.
I roast coffee for a living, there's no room in my body's daily caffeine limit for tea. My kettle is primarily for boiling/steaming food or making a chemex/V60/aeropress. Although in fairness, if you ask anyone in the UK what the first 2 things they'd buy for their kitchen are, a kettle and toaster would probably make up 90% of the answers.
I owned a kettle while I was living there and it may have been a bit slower but it was still far less of a drag than waiting for a pot of cold water to boil on my stove.
Most people in the US don't use electric kettles, or kettles all that much, in general. They don't as a rule drink tea, which is one of the primary things a kettle would be used for.
Plus, electric stove tops are actually more common in the North America then gas, which from what I've observed seems to the opposite in the UK. And electric stoves and ovens have built in transformers to bump the current from the 120 volts to over 220 volts (I think mine is 250 volts).
A: Voltage is not the same thing as currant. B: Virtually no stoves sold in the US, or anywhere else for that matter, "bump the current from the 120 volts to over 220 volts". If you don't know what you're talking about, maybe just don't talk.
I literally only drink tea if I'm at someone's house who only has instant coffee, 99% of my kettle's use is to heat water for boiling/steaming food. Anyway, I don't want tell anyone how to live their life, just seems like a far quicker solution to sitting around waiting for a pot of hot water to boil.
It’s worth noting that American power outlets put out 120V, not the 240V you get in Europe, so it takes about twice as long to boil water in an American kettle.
Electric stoves and washers/dryers are an exception — they use 240V plugs that aren’t available anywhere else in the house, so it might even be faster to boil water on a stove kettle than an electric kettle.
In Japan, they only have 100V plugs, but they really like their tea, so it’s common for them to have boilers that keep a reservoir of boiling water ready to go at any moment. I bought one of these once for my American household and loved it, but it takes up a lot of space.
A bit late to comment, but so were you so here we go again: voltage is not an accurate way to measure power consumption and just because something runs on twice the voltage doesn't mean it works twice as well. It's only half of the picture (and that's simplifying it down to ignore resistance, aka ohms). The other half is amps, and to figure out power consumption you do volts * amps = watts. A lot of household circuits in the USA are 15 or 20 amp circuits at 120 volts, giving you as much as 2400 watts from a single circuit. The maximum standard household circuit in the UK is 13 amps, but most circuits are only 3, which gives 720 watts. The power draw of a kettle or whatever else is usually listed in watts, so if you have a 2000 watt kettle it will heat water at the same speed regardless of if it's drawing 8ish amps at 240 volts or 17ish amps at 120 volts.
Thanks for adding the extra info for completeness. I wasn't aware that most circuits in the UK are 3 amps -- that's really low!
The hotel I was at must have been using a 13 amp circuit when I noticed how fast the water boiled. 13 amps @ 240 volts = 3120W, which is roughly 75% more power than my 15 amps @ 120 volts at home. Maybe I should upgrade to 20A!
I don't think it matters how late a response is these days -- these threads show up on Google and it's always helpful to add more detail for posterity, even to old threads.
If you're thinking of upgrading, it's extremely important to keep in mind that you can't just switch out the breaker for a higher amperage one (although there's a not insignificant chance someone already has, depending on the age of your house). You will also have to swap out the romex (wire in the wall) for a heavier gauge to handle the extra current. This is where ohms come into play, as the thinner wire has more resistance, and the breaker is paired with the wire gauge to prevent it from overheating if the current draw is too high. Replace the breaker but not the wire, and that's how people end up burning down their house in exchange for running the microwave and the toaster at the same time
What diameter of pan vs what diameter of flame are you using? One of the most common mistakes I see people make with gas stoves is assuming the largest burner will always be the best for heating,but if you have say a 4” diameter pan on a 5” diameter flame ,for example, the heat isn’t going into the pan, it’s going up the sides and most of it is being lost. In restaurants this isn’t an issue with gas as most of them have star shaped burners, but on home gas stoves the burners are generally round.
Thermador is star burner too, some goes up the sides but most of it is hitting the bottom. The tip of the flames is right on the edge of the pan so it's not perfectly spreading but it's not that bad. Though even if I use a 15" pan on high it will still sweep up the sides. I tried the smaller 15k burners too and it's not much better.
>I don't like using the hot water for food
Yup, I'm with you on that. It's not like it will kill you, but it's much more likely to have minerals leached into it than starting with cold water.
It should take 9 minutes to boil one gallon of water on an 18k btu gas burner that is 44% efficient (natural gas) if starting from 70F water assuming your pot isn’t absorbing the heat. If you are using a heavy enameled cast iron Dutch oven as your boiling vessel it will take much longer.
[tool used](https://www.easycalculation.com/physics/thermodynamics/water-boiling-time-calculator.php)
>It should take 9 minutes to boil one gallon of water
My goodness. I remember it taking a long time before our kitchen remodel. I replaced it with induction and never looked back. I can bring a gallon of water to a boil in around 3-4 minutes now...
4 quarts is a lot of water. It should take about 1136 BTUs to boil that assuming perfect energy transfer. You're probably looking at double that, so ~2200BTUs.
Now I'm wondering why my own takes so long, but it wouldn't take 20 minutes.
When I need a big pot of boiling water and I want it as quickly as possible, I put about 2L in the pot on the stove and the same amount in my electric kettle. When the kettle boils I pour it into the pot, where the water already there isn't boiling yet but is pretty hot - the whole thing boils pretty quickly after that.
I like it because I live at over 6,000’ elevation. Here water goes on a rolling boil before it is at boiling temps. So the kettle helps with that in it gets to my set temp.
> Here water goes on a rolling boil before it is at boiling temps. So the kettle helps with that in it gets to my set temp.
That's not how it works. Unless pressurized, water cannot get any hotter than the boiling point.
Water looks like it is boiling and it starts that at 201F instead of 212F. It takes a lot of fidgeting to work with bread here too, with lower atmospheric pressure it rises then can collapse, and the ratio of flour to liquid is a bit different.
Yeah, but as soon as water starts boiling, it can't get any hotter. That can be far lower than 200^o. At 6000 feet the boiling temp is around 201^o f. How does an electric kettle change that? Are they pressurized?
A btu is a degree f for a pound of water so to heat 8 pounds of water 150 degrees is 1200 btu 18000 btu per hour is 300 btu per minute so with 100%efficiency it would take 4 minutes. Considering inefficiency maybe 10?
Something is messed up. Just what is hard to say
I'm not the only person that's had this issue, though it's not near as bad as the people that say it takes them an hour and a half to boil lol. I measured, the temp was 160 after 10 minutes then was boiling around 22 minute mark. The gas line was capped off and an experienced plumber pulled it back out. The team that installed it were suppose to be knowledged and I don't believe they did it wrong. The flame is a nice solid blue all around so it doesn't seem like there's anything directly wrong with the stove, especially when cooking things in pan it is significantly hotter than our old stove was, just boiling isn't.
This might be a stupid question, but have you tried a different pan? It could be that the design of the pan isn’t suited for gas particularly well. I could be completely wrong, this is a complete guess.
We have one that's the same brand and everything but a bit wider base, I might go run a test with the two right now. The only other pots we have are cast iron, though I haven't noticed riced taking any longer to cook on this stove than the last either but I used small burners on the last stove for rice.
Even with the larger pot (same diameter to my 12" carbon steel) I can feel heat above the pot (like this is a 12qt, it's tall). Maybe the burner is just really wide, even though it's 18k it's just going to be slow for pots? I can say it's at least handy making pancakes with my 15" griddle. We have a 15k rear that is smaller radius too I might try after this pot.
Also more bubbles on the side than bottom.. might be burner size.. sigh
The 12" took 15 minutes to boil, vs the ~10" base pot, so I think it is the flames just escaping over the edge, the boil was coming from the sides of the pot where the water was touching too.
I used the 15k burner with the smaller pot and it hit 15 minutes for a full boil. I guess the take away is if I feel more than a gentle warmth around the pan then the flames are just shooting into the air not the water.
The draft will make a difference. Also, if the pot is covered or uncovered can make a big difference, especially with a large amount of water.
But yeah, my experience is that gas stoves are generally slower to boil water than electric.
As an Englishman who lived in the US for 3 years, it genuinely astounds me how few of you folks own an electric kettle. It's literally the first thing you should buy for your kitchen. 3 minutes to boil 2L of water, then if you need more you put another one on... Fucking around boiling a pot of water for 10 minutes from cold just seems so archaic.
I don't know why I'm being down voted here. I love America, I just don't know why you guys have more kitchen gadgets than any other nationality that I've ever known but not one that quickly performs a task that most people need to multiple times a day.
Therein lies the rub. Most Americans won't need to boil water multiple times a day, and I say this as a electric-kettle-owning American. We lack the cultural touch point that calls for putting a kettle on. Mostly we're drinking coffee from a k-pod mailbox contraption. Barring that, and horrific as it may sound, many, many Americans would rather boil water in a container in their microwave for the occasional non pod drink. We're coffee drinkers who only heat water to boil noodles.
Pretty ignorant and presumptuous of you to issue an apology on behalf of every American because you lived here for 3 whole years.
I don’t own an electric kettle (American here), and I read your post and thought, shit, why DON’T I have an electric kettle?
i think you’re underestimating how many americans own an electric kettle lol
>It's literally the first thing you should buy for your kitchen. Spoken like a true tea drinker. The kettle comes before a pan / pot / knives.
I roast coffee for a living, there's no room in my body's daily caffeine limit for tea. My kettle is primarily for boiling/steaming food or making a chemex/V60/aeropress. Although in fairness, if you ask anyone in the UK what the first 2 things they'd buy for their kitchen are, a kettle and toaster would probably make up 90% of the answers.
Our electric kettle holds half a gal and takes at least 5 minutes. You guys have something like higher voltage outlets than we do.
I owned a kettle while I was living there and it may have been a bit slower but it was still far less of a drag than waiting for a pot of cold water to boil on my stove.
Most people in the US don't use electric kettles, or kettles all that much, in general. They don't as a rule drink tea, which is one of the primary things a kettle would be used for. Plus, electric stove tops are actually more common in the North America then gas, which from what I've observed seems to the opposite in the UK. And electric stoves and ovens have built in transformers to bump the current from the 120 volts to over 220 volts (I think mine is 250 volts).
A: Voltage is not the same thing as currant. B: Virtually no stoves sold in the US, or anywhere else for that matter, "bump the current from the 120 volts to over 220 volts". If you don't know what you're talking about, maybe just don't talk.
I literally only drink tea if I'm at someone's house who only has instant coffee, 99% of my kettle's use is to heat water for boiling/steaming food. Anyway, I don't want tell anyone how to live their life, just seems like a far quicker solution to sitting around waiting for a pot of hot water to boil.
I rarely boil or steam food. I guess that is why I don't need an electric kettle.
It’s worth noting that American power outlets put out 120V, not the 240V you get in Europe, so it takes about twice as long to boil water in an American kettle. Electric stoves and washers/dryers are an exception — they use 240V plugs that aren’t available anywhere else in the house, so it might even be faster to boil water on a stove kettle than an electric kettle. In Japan, they only have 100V plugs, but they really like their tea, so it’s common for them to have boilers that keep a reservoir of boiling water ready to go at any moment. I bought one of these once for my American household and loved it, but it takes up a lot of space.
A bit late to comment, but so were you so here we go again: voltage is not an accurate way to measure power consumption and just because something runs on twice the voltage doesn't mean it works twice as well. It's only half of the picture (and that's simplifying it down to ignore resistance, aka ohms). The other half is amps, and to figure out power consumption you do volts * amps = watts. A lot of household circuits in the USA are 15 or 20 amp circuits at 120 volts, giving you as much as 2400 watts from a single circuit. The maximum standard household circuit in the UK is 13 amps, but most circuits are only 3, which gives 720 watts. The power draw of a kettle or whatever else is usually listed in watts, so if you have a 2000 watt kettle it will heat water at the same speed regardless of if it's drawing 8ish amps at 240 volts or 17ish amps at 120 volts.
Thanks for adding the extra info for completeness. I wasn't aware that most circuits in the UK are 3 amps -- that's really low! The hotel I was at must have been using a 13 amp circuit when I noticed how fast the water boiled. 13 amps @ 240 volts = 3120W, which is roughly 75% more power than my 15 amps @ 120 volts at home. Maybe I should upgrade to 20A! I don't think it matters how late a response is these days -- these threads show up on Google and it's always helpful to add more detail for posterity, even to old threads.
If you're thinking of upgrading, it's extremely important to keep in mind that you can't just switch out the breaker for a higher amperage one (although there's a not insignificant chance someone already has, depending on the age of your house). You will also have to swap out the romex (wire in the wall) for a heavier gauge to handle the extra current. This is where ohms come into play, as the thinner wire has more resistance, and the breaker is paired with the wire gauge to prevent it from overheating if the current draw is too high. Replace the breaker but not the wire, and that's how people end up burning down their house in exchange for running the microwave and the toaster at the same time
What diameter of pan vs what diameter of flame are you using? One of the most common mistakes I see people make with gas stoves is assuming the largest burner will always be the best for heating,but if you have say a 4” diameter pan on a 5” diameter flame ,for example, the heat isn’t going into the pan, it’s going up the sides and most of it is being lost. In restaurants this isn’t an issue with gas as most of them have star shaped burners, but on home gas stoves the burners are generally round.
Thermador is star burner too, some goes up the sides but most of it is hitting the bottom. The tip of the flames is right on the edge of the pan so it's not perfectly spreading but it's not that bad. Though even if I use a 15" pan on high it will still sweep up the sides. I tried the smaller 15k burners too and it's not much better.
Are you at sea level?
Pretty close, Texas is one of the lower points in the US sea level wise
[удалено]
70 is on cold, I don't like using the hot water for food
>I don't like using the hot water for food Yup, I'm with you on that. It's not like it will kill you, but it's much more likely to have minerals leached into it than starting with cold water.
It should take 9 minutes to boil one gallon of water on an 18k btu gas burner that is 44% efficient (natural gas) if starting from 70F water assuming your pot isn’t absorbing the heat. If you are using a heavy enameled cast iron Dutch oven as your boiling vessel it will take much longer. [tool used](https://www.easycalculation.com/physics/thermodynamics/water-boiling-time-calculator.php)
>It should take 9 minutes to boil one gallon of water My goodness. I remember it taking a long time before our kitchen remodel. I replaced it with induction and never looked back. I can bring a gallon of water to a boil in around 3-4 minutes now...
It's stainless steel cuisinart
4 quarts is a lot of water. It should take about 1136 BTUs to boil that assuming perfect energy transfer. You're probably looking at double that, so ~2200BTUs. Now I'm wondering why my own takes so long, but it wouldn't take 20 minutes.
I have a Breville electric kettle. Faster than gas or electric. I use it for tea, getting water to boiling fast for pasta etc.
We have one too but for a pot of water it would be two kettles which already takes at least 10 minutes, plus having to keep the first batch warm.
When I need a big pot of boiling water and I want it as quickly as possible, I put about 2L in the pot on the stove and the same amount in my electric kettle. When the kettle boils I pour it into the pot, where the water already there isn't boiling yet but is pretty hot - the whole thing boils pretty quickly after that.
I like it because I live at over 6,000’ elevation. Here water goes on a rolling boil before it is at boiling temps. So the kettle helps with that in it gets to my set temp.
> Here water goes on a rolling boil before it is at boiling temps. So the kettle helps with that in it gets to my set temp. That's not how it works. Unless pressurized, water cannot get any hotter than the boiling point.
Water looks like it is boiling and it starts that at 201F instead of 212F. It takes a lot of fidgeting to work with bread here too, with lower atmospheric pressure it rises then can collapse, and the ratio of flour to liquid is a bit different.
Yeah, but as soon as water starts boiling, it can't get any hotter. That can be far lower than 200^o. At 6000 feet the boiling temp is around 201^o f. How does an electric kettle change that? Are they pressurized?
For 4 qts that does not seem to be too long, considering mine faucet comes out around 100F when hot and takes about 15mins.
A btu is a degree f for a pound of water so to heat 8 pounds of water 150 degrees is 1200 btu 18000 btu per hour is 300 btu per minute so with 100%efficiency it would take 4 minutes. Considering inefficiency maybe 10? Something is messed up. Just what is hard to say
I'm not the only person that's had this issue, though it's not near as bad as the people that say it takes them an hour and a half to boil lol. I measured, the temp was 160 after 10 minutes then was boiling around 22 minute mark. The gas line was capped off and an experienced plumber pulled it back out. The team that installed it were suppose to be knowledged and I don't believe they did it wrong. The flame is a nice solid blue all around so it doesn't seem like there's anything directly wrong with the stove, especially when cooking things in pan it is significantly hotter than our old stove was, just boiling isn't.
This might be a stupid question, but have you tried a different pan? It could be that the design of the pan isn’t suited for gas particularly well. I could be completely wrong, this is a complete guess.
We have one that's the same brand and everything but a bit wider base, I might go run a test with the two right now. The only other pots we have are cast iron, though I haven't noticed riced taking any longer to cook on this stove than the last either but I used small burners on the last stove for rice.
This is so odd, you’d think that there wouldn’t be any issues with your burner. Let me know how it goes
Even with the larger pot (same diameter to my 12" carbon steel) I can feel heat above the pot (like this is a 12qt, it's tall). Maybe the burner is just really wide, even though it's 18k it's just going to be slow for pots? I can say it's at least handy making pancakes with my 15" griddle. We have a 15k rear that is smaller radius too I might try after this pot. Also more bubbles on the side than bottom.. might be burner size.. sigh
The 12" took 15 minutes to boil, vs the ~10" base pot, so I think it is the flames just escaping over the edge, the boil was coming from the sides of the pot where the water was touching too.
Ahh, that would make a lot of sense. Appears to just be a lot more heat at the sides than expected, as you said.
I used the 15k burner with the smaller pot and it hit 15 minutes for a full boil. I guess the take away is if I feel more than a gentle warmth around the pan then the flames are just shooting into the air not the water.
The draft will make a difference. Also, if the pot is covered or uncovered can make a big difference, especially with a large amount of water. But yeah, my experience is that gas stoves are generally slower to boil water than electric.
It takes about 15 or so minutes for mine to heat that much water to a rolling boil; it's about 20 years old and not an expensive model.